Child's Memory Lives On

By Virginia Smith
Staff Writer
Last update: 31 October 2003

DAYTONA BEACH -- It is quite unlikely anyone remembers Marie De La Cruz alive. "DE LA CRUZ, Marie A.," reads the pink stone, daisies carved into its top corner. "Filipino baby, aged 3 years, d. Mar 15 1907." Dead, she is hardly forgotten. Her grave, near the Main Street gate of Pinewood Cemetery, is festooned with conch and cockleshells, Sunday palms twisted into crosses, a teddy bear in academic robes, a Barney doll edged in black mold, Mardi Gras beads, a Confederate flag. "You go there one day and there's shells; another day there's a Jesus picture," says Dusty Smith, who leads Daytona Ghost Tours and visits the cemetery often. "Someone is very, very devoted to this young lady." Last week a tiny book of scripture, placed reverently on a yellow satin pillow, opened to Mark 10:14: "Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not: for such is the Kingdom of God." This Wednesday it opened to Matthew 1:21.

"It was the wind, turning the pages," said Bill Warrington, the president of the Historic Pinewood Cemetery Association, which raises funds to restore the old graves.

The group's treasurer, Mike Forest, neither agreed nor disagreed as he circled Marie's headstone. A cherubic leg, and below it half a foot, are all that remain of the statue the headstone once bore. "I think she was kneeling," said Forest. The two men, both retired, clear dead trees, restore marble crypts and mend coquina walls in the 19th century graveyard, which retains the crests and valleys of the dunes it was built on, and a certain crumbled serenity from decades of neglect. Warrington thinks there are multiple pilgrims to the De La Cruz grave -- which might explain the lack of a common theme among the objects piled on it. "I've come here nights and found vagrants sitting there," he said, pointing to the nearby plot of a Mr. Griggs, aged 72 years and 9 months. "I asked them what they were doing. They said 'praying over the baby.' "

"I'm not sure they were praying," said Forest.

In the little scripture book, soggy from rain, the verse reads: "And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins." Forest disappeared among the stones, seeking dry palmetto branches to remove. Warrington pointed out the sunken, broken barrier around the De La Cruz grave. Eventually, he said, it will be restored.

Until then Marie will have to make do with her crosses, her toys and her enigmas.